The Sergeant's Lady Read Free Page A

was too spent to talk, and Sergeant Reynolds resumed his pacing. Anna and Sergeant Atkins attended to Juana, occasionally conversing when her situation allowed it.
    “And where do you come from?” she asked as she raised to her lips the canteen he offered her. The afternoon was growing even hotter, and she took several gulps of the water despite its brackish warmth.
    “Shropshire.” His eyes grew distant.
    “And you grew up on a farm and helped with the lambing?” She splashed a little water onto her handkerchief and laid it across Juana’s brow. It couldn’t be very cooling, but surely it was better than nothing.
    “Not exactly,” he said. “The farm was my brother-in-law’s, and I was an apprentice of sorts. My father has an inn, but it’s to go to my brother Tim, so my family meant to set me up as a farmer.”
    His people sounded too prosperous for him to have been driven to enlist out of poverty. “Then why are you here? If it’s not too impertinent of me to ask.”
    He brushed an unruly lock of chestnut hair out of his eyes. “Not at all, ma’am. It’s a simple story. The recruiters came to town when I was sixteen and restless.”
    “And now here you are.”
    “Yes. After a few adventures along the way.”
    That must be an understatement. At some point before she had arrived, he’d shed his regiment’s distinctive green jacket and the black stock he ought to have worn at his throat. With him in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, she could see two scars, one on his left forearm and a second at his collarbone. Both were long, thin lines of the type made by a saber. She wondered how many more marks of battle were hidden from her view.
    Soon Juana’s labor grew more strenuous, and she screamed through each pain. Terrified, Anna wondered what was taking Beatriz so long. Helen and María shouldn’t have been that far ahead. If they didn’t arrive soon, she and Sergeant Atkins would have to deliver this baby themselves. She tried to remember what the midwife had done for Helen when Charlie was born, but her mind was a blank.
    During her next pain, Juana looked at them, her eyes wild. “I think it’s coming,” she said in Spanish. English had deserted her.
    “What now?” Sergeant Atkins asked.
    “I wish I knew! My cousin had a birthing chair. Maybe she should squat.”
    “Hands and knees.” They stared at Sergeant Reynolds in surprise. “I saw it done so, once before.”
    Sergeant Atkins looked at her questioningly, and she shrugged assent. Between the pains the three of them helped Juana shift into the new position. Sergeant Reynolds searched through a bundle of gear, finding a small cache of clean linen cloths, while Anna helped Sergeant Atkins ease Juana’s skirts out of the way. If anyone had told her that morning she’d be doing such a service for a woman she’d never met before, she’d have thought them mad. Yet one did what one must. Such was life following the drum.
    “It’s coming, right enough,” Sergeant Atkins said. “See the head?”
    She cast aside the remnants of her modesty and looked. “Soon, Juana,” she said. “And your baby will not be bald.”
    Juana screamed, and the head began to emerge. Anna’s heart climbed to her throat, and Sergeant Atkins’s calm amazed her as he caught the wet, blue-tinged head in his big, dexterous hands. But then she noticed the tightness of his jaw and the way the muscles by his ear twitched. He was as frightened as she was—he simply hid it better.
    After another few pushes, the baby slid into his hands. For a long, breathless moment they waited until the silence was broken by a sputtering cry.
    Sergeant Atkins gaped at the squirming baby in his hands and laughed aloud. “We did it.”
    Anna too laughed in relief. “We did.”
    “Boy or girl?” Juana asked between panting breaths.
    “A girl,” Sergeant Atkins said.
    “A beautiful girl,” Anna added, and it was true. Angry red face and misshapen head notwithstanding, the baby was a